When I don't feel like Jeremiah Johnson, one of the best things I like to do in the winter in Pennsylvania is to read books (reading books is great in California too, but it's a lot easier to spend an entire Saturday reading when it's 35 degrees outside and raining than when it's 85 degrees and sunny). The following is an annotated bibliography of some of the best books I have read while "wintering over" in PA.
Titles that are hyperlinked lead to more comments or selected quotes from the book.
A Rumor of War by Philip Caputo (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1977, 1996)
A haunting account of one soldier's life during Vietnam. This book isn't your typical "gung-ho to drug addict" account of a soldier's demise in Vietnam. Caputo's account is thoughtful and doesn't invoke most of the "My Lai" stereotypes associated with the war. Caputo's demons are cold food, rainy nights on picket duty, and good friends who died for nothing. The book captures, as few other do, the essence of a senseless and hollow war.
Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl (New York: Washington Square Books, 1984).
One of the best books I have read in my life. The book plumbs the depths of human existence from the background of the holocaust. Frankl gives a profound account of how suffering can be meaningful even when it apparently leads "nowhere."
The Age of Napoleon: A History of European Civilization from 1789 to 1815 by Will and Ariel Durant, part of the Story of Civilization series, Vols. 1-11 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975).
A friend gave me vol. 11 of the Durants' classic Story of Civilization, which left me without excuse for at least reading one book in the series. Like all "grand" works of historiography, I wasn't satisfied with the level of detail. I still don't have a clear outline in my mind of the details of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars (shame on me!), but I know more now than before I read the book. However, I found the scope of the book to be outstanding, particularly those portions devoted to artists, literary figures, and philosophers. Also, the Durants' reputation as being outstanding writers is very deserved. They better be if they're going to hold my attention for 700+ pages! Whether or not I will ever get to vols. 1-10 is questionable. Excellent writers or not, they're big books.
The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century by Perry Miller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954).
"The" book on the intellectual life of American Puritans. Miller explores the philosophical and theological assumptions of American Puritans with a view towards explaining how these factors contributed to the vigor of Puritan life. Perhaps more than any other work, this book "rescued" American Puritanism from simply being the object of scorn and ridicule among historians. Miller neither exonerates nor demonizes the Puritans, but his book shows why Puritan ideas have to be taken seriously in any account of the American intellectual tradition.
The Soup Has Many Eyes : From Shtetl to Chicago : A Memoir of One Family's Journey Through History by Joann Rose Leonard (New York: Bantam, 2000).
Below is a review I wrote for Amazon.com for this book:
This exquisite little book, The Soup Has Many Eyes, is a hybrid of history, mystery, proverb, and poetry. Most of all, it is a mother’s memoir to her two sons, Josh and Jonny, as they embark upon their own journey in life – a journey that is both connected and disconnected with its heritage.
Perhaps a little too disconnected, or so the author, Joann Leonard, believes. In her narrative, Leonard attempts to fill in the spaces for her sons, to connect them to their past so that their present will have context. While much of the book narrates her family’s struggles as they leave Russia amid the pogroms of the early 20th century to come to America, the “history” of the book serves as a backdrop for Leonard’s musings about life and legacy. What do traditions mean? What do their voices say today? Can they serve her sons too, the children of a Jewish mother and a father who is the son of a Lutheran pastor? Leonard wonders (or laments?), “Did I tell them, did I tell them? Little things, forgotten. Big things, omitted. Things that, because I didn’t know how to tell you, my hands and eyes tried to word.” In The Soup Has Many Eyes, Leonard tells them.
And so much she tells them. Across time, Leonard spirits Gramma Chana back for an archetypical dialogue on her maternal doubts.
“‘Gramma Chana, tell me,’ I ask, ‘how do you know?’
‘Know what, child?’
‘What mothers are supposed to know?’
‘Know? Achhh! What is there to know? You hoe your gratchkeh, the bread you knead until it feels just so, when comes the baby, you push. For this you need to know? Your heart, do you tell it to beat? Your breath, do you say “now in, now out”? So what’s all this “know”?’ . . . ‘Look at the men with their watery eyes, Joann. They squint at their books for so many years, they squint out all the color from their eyes. They clutch their foreheads with their hands ready to snatch the live thing inside that gnaws to get out. But always, there are more questions.’
‘So what am I supposed to do, Gramma?’
‘Do? Make the soup. That’s what you do.’”
Ultimately, Joann’s “answer” is that turgid alchemy of past and present that connects all the hope and fears of all generations going back to Eve.
“Josh and Jonny, do you ever remember us hugging you so hard and so long that you felt as if you couldn’t breathe, as if it would never end? That’s the hug of parents holding their child for all the parents in the world whose arms go empty. Parents whose children have been stolen from them by war, starvation, hatred, drugs, disease, despair. It is an embrace born out of guilt and gratitude that our child is here, though we are no more deserving. It is a fierce attempt to ring you with talisman and benediction.”
Leonard’s letter to her children is timeless because its taproot reaches down into the mystery of our dreams and memories. We live, love, work, and die to pass down our wisdom to our progeny. And why? Who can know? But The Soup Has Many Eyes describes the what and how if not the why and why not, and in Leonard’s vivid images of her own history our collective consciousnesses meet.